the coming hero: mute, catatonic, carried by extras
the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.
Context
The essay's unsupported flourish predicts the book's own preoccupation: a hero "divorced from all stimulus," beyond reaction, borne across the set by extras — a protagonist reduced to the condition of a figurant, present and unresponsive, the center of a scene he cannot participate in. It reaches forward to the catatonic and the tube-mouthed all through the novel, and installs the figurant (the burly voiceless extra doing the carrying) as the load-bearing figure of the entertainment to come.